Recent Posts

Some­times you look at other people’s code and go why didn’t I think of that. Which is exactly what I thought when I saw Paul Irish’s elg­ant solu­tion to the old con­di­tional com­ments vs CSS hacks dilema. The HTML5Boilerplate by Paul Irish and Divya Manian is a col­lec­tion of elg­ant solu­tions to com­mon prob­lems in web coding.

Boil­er­plate is not a tem­plate or frame­work, just a set of tools to get that site developed quickly. I know I will be mak­ing use of most of it in the near future.

Franki Nguyen recom­men­ded Tra Vinh to me last year and I made the long trek up Wil­liam Street passed my cur­rent favour­ite Viet­namese Noodle House, Phong Vinh to Bris­bane Streer to Tra Vinh.

It has been very quiet around here, for a num­ber of reas­ons. I did expect my three week enforced rest to be spent learn­ing and exper­i­ment­ing with the likes of CSS3 and HTML5 and then blog­ging about it. Instead I spent most of the time in the shed play­ing bicycle mechanic.

Once back at work, my usual blog­ging time on the train trip to and from work dis­ap­peared, as my Mac­Book Pro died and I star­ted rid­ing to work more often.

I need to start blog­ging on a more reg­u­lar basis …

Apo­lo­gies to David McComb. For those who do not fol­low my twit­ter feed, I will tell you what happened over the past few days.

I was rid­ing to work on Fri­day morn­ing, when I star­ted hav­ing a pain in the chest …

RGBa is the new black, with sup­port in most mod­ern Safari 3, Fire­fox 3 and Opera 10, you can have semi trans­par­ent ele­ments. Only there is no sup­port cur­rently in IE for RGBa.

How­ever, you can eas­ily fake it for back­grounds of block ele­ments in IE with
filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Gradient(GradientType=1, StartColorStr='#aaRRBBGG', EndColorStr='#aaRRBBGG);
The fil­ter gradi­ent places a alpha chan­nel col­our gradi­ent over the back­ground. So as long the back­ground is trans­par­ent, the start and end col­ours the same and the alpha (aa) chan­nel a value greater than 0 (fully trans­par­ent) and FF (fully opaque), you get a block ele­ment in IE with a RGBa back­ground. You can see an example of RGBa in action in IE …

For those who have not seen my Edge of the Web CSS3 demon­stra­tion I used the CSS Zen Garden HTML. Why, because I wanted to use some­body else’s HTML, mainly because I wanted to show it works with any HTML and that most people would be famil­iar with the site.

I will not sub­mit it, because Dave has not accep­ted any new sub­mis­sions almost two year, my demo is far from the visual stand­ard of most other design and I broke one major rule the CSS does not validate.

I really enjoyed devel­op­ing my present­a­tion for Edge of the Web. The research and exper­i­ment­a­tion was a lot of fun. Explore the demo using CSS Zen Garden HTML and ser­i­ously try it in IE6, the Web­Jam present­a­tion with some even more out­rageous trans­itions needs Safari4 or FF3.7 and a little explor­ing with a mouse.

What I learnt is enough from prob­ably a dozen blog posts, so hope­fully I will be writ­ing lot in the next few weeks.

For those who have not seen my Edge of the Web CSS3 demon­stra­tion I used the CSS Zen Garden HTML. Why, because I wanted to use some­body else’s HTML, mainly because I wanted to show it works with any HTML and that most people would be famil­iar with the site.

I will not sub­mit it, because Dave has not accep­ted any new sub­mis­sions almost two year, my demo is far from the visual stand­ard of most other design and I broke one major rule the CSS does not validate.

Well I am speak­ing at the Edge of the Web Con­fer­ence in Perth in Novem­ber. The title Pro­gress­ive Enhance­ment with CSS: Or how I stopped wor­ry­ing about IE6 and start­ing lov­ing CSS3.

The aim is to show how you can use CSS2 and CSS3 to improve the exper­i­ence of vis­it­ors using mod­ern browsers, while not block­ing access to those people still using older browsers like IE6 …

If you are like me, on occa­sions you have people want to paste dir­ectly from Word into CMS or Word­press. I was bemoan­ing the fact, that you either end up with Word HTML or lose all the format­ting, when a col­league of mine, Steven Miles sug­gest I use JavaS­cript to clean up the HTML and provide the some code.

So this is what I cre­ated to clean up Word HTML, you paste the HTML is to the edit­able div, hit the but­ton and if you are using Inter­net Explorer the con­ver­ted HTML is copied to your clip­board. So you can paste the clean HTML (note it is HTML code) straight into the CMS editor in HTML mode …

*** does not cur­rently work in IE8, I need to invest­ig­ate further ***